Friday Philosophy – A Comment on Comments September 25, 2009

This blog is not about blog comments. It’s about table and column comments in the data dictionary.

Some of you may well be going “huh?”. Others are probably going “Oh yes, I remember them?”. Table and column comments appear to be suffering the same fate as ERDs, who’s slow demise I bemoaned a couple of weeks ago. They are becoming a feature not known about or used by those with “less personal experience of history” {ie younger}.

It’s a simple principle, you can add a comment against a table or a column,up to 4000 characters. {you can also add comments against index types, materialized views and operators (huh?), at least in 10.2}.

So you can stick basic information into the data dictionary where it will remain with the object until the object is dropped or the comment is updated. (You can’t drop a comment, you can only update it to ”:

>comment on table widlakem.person is ”;

It’s simple, it’s sensible, it’s solid.

And it seems to be dying out. In fact, I had stopped adding comments to my tables and columns as no one else seemed to bother. Probably as a consequence of them not being added, no one ever seemed to think to look at them to get hints about the database structure and table/column use.

But Raj sitting next to me is as old a hand at this game as myself and I “caught” him adding comments to the little schema we are working on together. Well, if he is bothering, so will I!

How about Oracle Corp? How do they manage on this front? After all, the Oracle Reference manual has all these short descriptions of tables and columns in the data dictionary {some helpful, some utterly unhelpful}:

If you don’t add comments to tables and comments, you will just have blank entries for them in the data dictionary.

So why not pop a few real comments in there, especially for any tables or comments where the name is not really telling you what that column or table is for? It’s free and easy, and it might just prove useful. And if you add them to your tables, I’ll add them to mine.